


Black Palm

by whatsanapocalae



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Denial of Feelings, Hurt/Comfort, Men Crying, My First Work in This Fandom, Nausea, Pain, Painkillers, Pining, Pizza, Trans Male Character, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 10:17:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16093613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsanapocalae/pseuds/whatsanapocalae
Summary: Five days off of work, just after coming back from his leave. Pritchard isn't a mechanic, a doctor, or a friend, and he has to keep all this in check when he finds Adam in his apartment. Regection isn't the worst thing that can come from new augments.





	Black Palm

Five days. It had been five days since Jensen had been to work and he’d been acting oddly even before that. He kept staring at his hands, staring at the walls, too quiet, too far away, and way too easy to push. He’d always taken what Pritchard was able to give him, twist it, and throw it back in a way that no one else would even try, but lately he’d just gone silent, let Pritchard abuse him, and walk off without a word. 

There was work that had to be done. Pritchard was missing out on fixing that goddamn firewall that someone kept breaking with pop up porn ads and there was something going wrong with the cameras situated outside of the bathrooms and there had been a bomb threat yesterday and the fact of the matter was that Pritchard should have been at work, Jensen should have been at work, not hiding away at home with a voicemail to Sarif at three in the morning that said, “sorry, I can’t come in, don’t know when I can.” Instead Sarif had sent Pritchard over to check on him and discuss the meeting that was coming up. Jensen was going to have to be there. 

That didn’t mean Pritchard had to like it, being an errand boy. He liked the fact that Jensen’s door was not only unlocked but slightly open, even less. He wondered if he should have knocked, but doing so would only push the door open further. He put his palm against it and pushed gently, calling out as he did. 

“Jensen? You alive in there?” 

His voice was the second loudest thing in the room, the first being the alarm, the woman complaining that there was an intruder in a soft but irritated voice. He was the one who had installed it, it was easy for him to shut her up with a quick password. 

He hadn’t heard Jensen’s reply, not to him or to the security system. 

He took a look around, just a quick glance. He’d never been in Jensen’s apartment before. It wasn’t a place for living. The windows were huge, bringing in a lot of light from outside and there was a decent sized television, but the whole place was a mess. There were boxes, lots of them, from moving in just scattered around the room, a table of gears and machinery shoved up against one wall with more gears on the floor, as if they’d been swiped away from the rest and never picked up. There was broken glass on the kitchen floor, the sink dripped, and there was cereal everywhere. It wasn’t just boxes piled up but bags torn apart, flakes and rings and marshmallow shapes having been flung all over the place. There were some bowls near the sink that had the remains crusted onto them. 

It looked like someone had broken in and tried to look in all the wrong places for valuables. 

It didn’t look like the sort of place he’d ever find Jensen in. The air felt wrong, his breathing too loud, and he tiptoed, still in his boots, through the large living room. There were pill bottles in obvious places, some of them empty and uncapped, a few with their contents spilled in piles. There were alcohol bottles too, in the same state. 

He felt like it was two in the morning and he was trying to sneak into the kitchen for snacks, not wanting to alert his parents. Every movement was too loud. Everything was too foreign. 

“Jensen?” he called out again. 

Nothing. 

He picked his way through the debris, pulling off his messenger bag and sliding it down the wall next to the hall. There wasn’t much of a hall and there were only two doors for him to choose from. 

The bed was large and the man within it looked so much smaller than Adam Jensen, curled in on himself, a blanket hiding most of his frame, his face tucked into his elbow. The bottles weren’t just out in the living room, weren’t just on his bedside table, but they were in his bed too, a bottle of whiskey tucked tight against his chest as if it were a lover instead. 

The room was hot, unbearably so, as Jensen’s body heat and augments raised the temperature, but Francis felt so cold standing there, frozen in place. His mouth was terribly dry, seeing how the black lines of Jensen’s body met pink scar tissue, the dots on his chest, the lines, the muscles. He tried to swallow. He’d never seen Jensen like this, of course, but he’d never seen the extent of his augmentations before either. He’d read about them but that didn’t compare to the truth of how deep they ran. 

Jensen whimpered and turned, lowering his arm and leaving the bottle behind. His face, for the moment Pritchard saw it, was squeezed, constrained, in pain. He wasn’t so much asleep as he was trying desperately not to be awake. If he was awake, he could feel. One of his hands were twisted, the clench of his fist tight enough to damage itself if it were flesh and bone. 

The ice melted off and Pritchard was at his side, trying to get onto the bed, to touch and soothe if he could. He was cold, callous, in the way that he spoke but pain wasn’t something he was equipped to handle. When he himself suffered from it he became brattier than usual, vitrol to anyone around him. He didn’t know what to do when it was someone else, especially when he didn’t know where it was hurting, but he knew that he wanted it to stop. Jensen had always been so strong and there had been no signs of rejection from his augments yet, he wasn’t supposed to feel pain at all. 

“Jensen? Jensen!” Pritchard called out to him again. He didn’t know where to put his hands, so he put them on Jensen’s shoulders, turning him onto his back. He kicked the whiskey bottle gently out of his way. “Jensen, I need you to wake up.”

One of Jensen’s eyes opened, the ring of gold brightening as he saw who was holding him there, his eyebrows digging deep grooves into his forehead, the same lines around his grimace. He breathed in through his teeth. 

“Jensen, I need to know what’s wrong. I need you to tell me.” He wanted to be snarky, rude, but right now he couldn’t come up with a way to say anything like that. He didn’t like it when people tried to get close to him but Jensen had gotten close without trying. He didn’t want to see the man suffer like that, like anything.

Jensen’s jaw was clenched so hard that his teeth must have hurt but he hissed out a single word, all the same. “Hands.”

Pritchard released his shoulders and he curled in on himself once more, dragging his hands upward, crossing his wrists in front of his chest. Pritchard let him, for a moment, noticing that they were both shaking, terribly. They weren’t supposed to shake at all. 

Pritchard put a hand to his own temple, pressing lightly to activate his infolink. “Sarif? It’s Pritchard. I need you to send me the full breakdown of Jensen’s arms and hands, now.”

“What’s this all about?” he heard his boss calculating, when he needed to be acting. “You know that stuff’s classified.”

“This is about the fact that you and your lab monkeys went way too far with this,” he spat in response, trying not to cross the line. Sarif was his boss, after all, “Everything is wound up so tight it’s about to break. You trust me with your companies firewalls, you trust me with fixing Jensen’s eyes, you should be able to give me the blueprints for his goddamn arms!”

“Fine, fine,” Sarif was pinching his brow. Pritchard didn’t care. He didn’t see the track marks down Jensen’s cheeks, where salt had collected over the past few days. “I’ll send it to your email, give me a couple minutes.”

“No,” Pritchard’s teeth were clenched now. He hated direct downloads, they always made him nauseous and they put a bad taste in his mouth, but it was faster, more direct, and he needed it. “Send it through my Neural Patch.”

Silence, just for a moment. “Yeah, alright. You let me know how he’s doing though, alright?”

Pritchard nodded, knowing Sarif couldn’t hear that. He pressed his hand to his temple again, turning off communications, and brought his attention back to Jensen. His hands spread out, reaching, stroking over the polymer wrists. Jensen whimpered again, almost pulling away. 

“Just a bit longer, okay?” Pritchard hated the compassion in his voice. It wasn’t fitting. “Give me a minute and I’ll turn those off. You’ll be completely useless, not just mentally.” That was a bad one, but it was something. Jensen’s eyes went up to his face for a moment, trying to register anything, before he closed them again. 

When the download came through it was like a migraine. The file was huge and it turned Pritchard’s stomach inside out, made his heart dip down into it as bile burned his throat. He shoved it down, swallowed, swallowed, tried to keep everything down, tried to will the pain and nausea away. None of it was as bad was what Jensen was feeling, he could guess that. He just had to keep that in mind. 

The blueprints were, out of context, beautiful. Seeing that some of Jensen’s original bones were still in there was a disturbing fact and he was forced to understand that it wasn’t just bones but some nerves that were still floating around in there, connected to artificial ones to stop him from breaking things all the time. 

Pritchard wasn’t an engineer. He wasn’t a mechanic or any of the million other things that Jensen needed at the moment, but he knew Jensen, at least a little bit, and neither of them had time to go to a LIMB clinic. Really, Jensen should have gone the first moment he’d felt any pain at all, but seeing the multitude of pills, Pritchard could tell he was self medicated. 

He’d always known that Jensen was an idiot. 

He reached forward, taking the closer of Jensen’s hands in his own. “Jensen, I’m going to need you to relax.” He tugged, gently, but the hand didn’t move. He sighed, leaned in. He didn’t know if Jensen could hear him, could understand him, through what all he was feeling. “Jensen, I can’t do my job if you’re going to be a stubborn mule about it. Just give me your hand so we can both be done with this.” No tact. Not clever. Just harsh. He wasn’t thinking well. There was another churn of his stomach. 

Jensen relaxed his arm though, let Pritchard pry it away from his body, the muscles still so tense that the bile was back in his throat and there was a sheen of sweat on his brow just from getting it into a position he could work with. He ran his finger across the joint in his elbow, then down the stripe between the two muscles, going left then right over his wrist. A tap to each finger pad and the arm was dead. Jensen sighed as the arm became nothing more than a dead weight, all of it relaxing and opening. 

“Please,” Jensen whined behind his teeth, throwing his other arm out there, fist almost colliding with Pritchard’s chin. There was so much desperation now that he knew this could end, his back arching, his eyes and brows still so tight. “Please. Pleasepleaseplease.”

“I heard you the first time,” Pritchard couldn’t stop, even as he tried to sound as condescending as he could, he couldn’t stop the sympathy in his voice. He took the hand though, repeated the same motion that he’d done with the first, and shut the limb down. 

The arms didn’t move, just lay there in Pritchard’s lap, and he breathed, trying to control his stomach. Adam, no, Jensen, was lying their, bathed in sweat and tears. Now, Pritchard could look at him, see his chest pounding, all of that black shining, soaked in sweat, against skin that was too pale to be healthy. His mouth was open, his lips red and puffy from where he’d bitten them. His cheeks were gaunt and Pritchard was certain that he wasn’t eating right. His eyes finally opened, finally looked at him, as his eyebrows softened. 

“If you move, I’m not responsible for you tearing your own limbs off,” Pritchard growled, shifting, placing the heavy arms at Jensen’s sides, laying on the mattress. He couldn’t do this anymore. He rushed out of the room, across the hall, and shoved himself into the bathroom, ignoring the clinl of broken glass on tile under his boots. He fell to his knees, yanking open the toilet seat, and vomited. 

He didn’t know how long he was there, on his knees, shaking, bile and saliva dripping from his lips. He could hear Jensen though, calling his name from the other room, a combination of relief and concern that should never have paired so well. His voice was raspy, more-so than usual, and Pritchard couldn’t help but wonder how often he’d screamed himself to unconsciousness over the past few days. The neighbors couldn’t have approved of that, but no one else had come. He must have prevented them hearing him some how. 

“Francis?” Jensen called out again and Pritchard pulled himself to his feet, going to the sink. He rinsed out his mouth, washed his face, tried to see the damage in the mirror. 

He’d been stepping in broken glass. The mirror was a mess, if it could even be called a mirror anymore. It was just shards, the shattered hole in it the right size for Adam’s (Jensen’s) fist. What had happened here? How had no one noticed that their head of security was falling apart so terribly?

“I’m here,” he grumbled, making his way back to the bedroom, dragging glass over in the knees of his cargo pants and the bottoms of his boots. Jensen’s brows were knotted differently know, with worry, as he looked Pritchard over with something that looked far too close to friendly than Pritchard was comfortable with. “Quit your grumbling. I’m here.”

“Why?” Jensen was breathless and Pritchard dragged his eyes away from his, picking up one of his hands and laying it in his lap. “Why are you here?”

Pritchard rolled his eyes. He didn’t bring any tools for this but the blueprints made it all seem like there were codes to getting pieces off anyway. He hoped that he wouldn’t need any but Jensen was working on something mechanical, so he probably had whatever Pritchard would end up needing. 

“Well, someone didn’t show up to work for five days and I can’t keep doing both of our jobs,” Pritchard grimaced, slotting his fingernail into the pad where Jensen’s thumb connected to his hand. “Not that yours is all that difficult, it’s just all those baboons you hired can’t keep the cameras pointed in the right direction for five minutes. Sarif didn’t think I should have the authority of firing the whole lot.”

The thumb popped out of the socket and Pritchard put it on the bedside table, next to all of the pill bottles. He was able to pull the panel off of the rest of his palm from there. 

“So you came to check up on me, yourself? Instead of sending over one of my baboons? I’m touched, Francis,” there was no poison in his mouth. He was trying but he just sounded tired and relieved. It made Pritchard feel sick in a different way than before. 

“Yes, well Sarif wants you at a meeting that’s coming up and you can’t make it there if you’re wallowing in a pile of booze and pills. Seriously I half expected to find you dead when I saw that mess.”

Under the panel there were a bunch of sensors and wires and all sorts of other parts. Pritchard knew what a lot of them were, but not all, and the blueprints didn’t tell him what was wrong. “What happened, anyway? What kind of pain were you in?”

“Bad pain,” Jensen closed his eyes, turning away. He wasn’t being very useful. “Real bad.”

His hair was sticking to his forehead ad Pritchard had the worst desire to brush it away. His beard wasn’t shaped either, the hair growing in higher on his cheeks. If he didn’t shave it was clear that he’d be completely covered in hair. 

“I’m not blind Jensen, I could see that. But was it tight? Heavy? Stabbing? Aching? You’re going to have to use your big boy words.”

“Tight pulling,” Jensen panted, “Like I was tensing my muscles, all the time, way past their limit. But I don’t have muscles anymore, do I?”

“You have nerves and bones, and you have artificial muscles, so yes, I would count them as yours.” Pritchard flipped through the blueprints in the back of his head, seeing what he needed to do. “I’m going to need a multitool for this. Don’t move.”

“Or I’ll rip my limbs off?”

“Or you’ll rip your limbs off.”

He wasn’t even out of the room when he heard a sound he wasn’t meant to, a quiet but quick sob, just under Jensen’s breath. He wasn’t supposed to be here, he wasn’t supposed to be doing this, and he sure as hell shouldn’t have heard that. It made him want to run, to hide, to never let any of Jensen’s feelings touch him again. He wasn’t supposed to see Jensen as a person, just as a coworker. It was making something deep within him, something that he didn’t want to even have, poke its head out of hibernation. 

There was a multitool in his bag, down by the bottom. There was no telling when one would come in handy. He grabbed it and a glass of water while he was out there. Searching around he did find a single straw in one of the drawers. There was no way he was going to hold Jensen’s head up so he could drink. That would just be too much. 

He was already in over his head. 

“Jensen?” he called out from the doorway. He didn’t want to see Jensen crying. The man was good enough to get a grip on himself before Pritchard was back on the bed, holding the straw to his lips. “You need water. All that booze couldn’t have been good for you.”

“It helped.”

“Yeah, well so would a bullet at this point,” he watched Jensen drink, his adams apple bob in his throat, his eyes close and his features relax. Relaxed was a good look on him. He didn’t see it much. 

He put the glass to the side and started to work, hovering the multitool over the sensors until a display popped up on the small screen. There were numbers, all of which were far too high, and he tutted in his throat. “No wonder you were smashing things like an angry ape in a computer shop, your grip pressure is set way out of bounds, as is, like, everything else.”

Jensen didn’t argue with him. He didn’t say anything. He just lay there, which was preferable for Pritchard, who liked working in silence, especially when there was so much going on in his head, with his own thoughts and the blueprints and the job at hand. And his hands were shaking as he adjusted Jensen’s levels, which he hoped Jensen didn’t notice with those golden eyes that seemed to catch everything, even when they were behind dark lenses.   
He put back the panel, then the thumb, all of it snapping into place easily. 

“I’m going to turn this back on,” Pritchard started but the intake of breath, the widening of eyes, told him more than a CASIE aug would have. If Jensen could have, he’d of grabbed Pritchard by the wrist to stop him. “Look, you want to spend your whole life without arms or do you want me to fix this? I’ve already done the work, I just need you to tell me if it’s right. If it’s too much, I’ll turn it back off.”

Jensen relaxed incrementally and Pritchard wanted to run his hands in those creases in his face, force them smooth. “Promise?”

“Well now, I would never expect that I’d need to pinky promise to not torture my colleague!” Colleague. Not friend. That was safer. 

Jensen closed his eyes again. Pritchard saw his eyelashes, clumped together from the salt of past tears, so dark against his cheekbones. He looked so tired and yet, Pritchard couldn’t help but find him. No. No, that wasn’t helping. That was the opposite of helping. “Fine.”

Pritchard worked backwards up his arm, pressing those same places in the opposite order. Jensen was tense the entire time and when the arm sprang to life it started with a curl of his fist. 

“You okay?” Pritchard asked, his hand still at his elbow, ready to sweep back, put the arm back down. 

“It’s fine,” Jensen admitted, relaxing, his fingers straightening one at a time as he tested them. 

“No pain?”

“A whole lot of pain. Just not here for once. Spent the past who-knows-how-long in a ball, all of my muscles hurt. I don’t have many but they seem to be compensating for the ones I lost.” Gruff, almost a laugh. Pritchard didn’t think he’d ever heard Jensen laugh. 

“Where can I touch you?” Pritchard asked and then realized how that must have sounded, “And before you say your dick make sure you realize that I am going to be squeezing whatever fleshy bit you still have as hard as I can.”

A smile then, teeth, and that laugh was being bitten back, making Pritchard want to hear it even more. “Is that supposed to be a threat? I doubt you’d squeeze enough to even get me hard.”

Pritchard’s hand was on his throat then, a test, that smile spread, as did a blush on Pritchard’s cheeks. Here he was trying to be delicate and kind and Jensen was still trying to press all his buttons. “If you want, we can start here.”

Jensen’s eyes held an invitation and a challenge. “Shoulder,” was what he said though and Pritchard moved his hand to the other side of the metal bar in his neck. He placed his free hand in Jensen’s. 

“I’m going to test your calibrations now, don’t get too excited. I’m going to squeeze and you’re going to squeeze my hand just as hard, no harder. If I tell you to stop, you will. This isn’t worth me breaking my hand over.”

“You’re so certain of your skills, Francis?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Jensen smirked and that was an expression Pritchard was used to, one that he knew the meaning of. It was safe. He started to squeeze, gentle at first, hardly an ounce of pressure. He felt his hand receive the same treatment, so gentle it felt like they were lovers, almost, except that there was no other time Pritchard would have allowed Jensen to hold hands with him. They were coworkers, nothing more. 

He squeezed more, felt more, squeezed until Jensen’s lips pulled back to show his grit teeth. He’d said that everything was hurting, all of the muscles pulled. This was aggravating it. Pritchard’s hand was hurting as much as it did his first day at work, shaking Sarif’s hand for the first time, on the losing side of that test of authority. He was better with his wit than his brawn. 

“No more breaking mugs, it seems,” he nodded his satisfaction, releasing both Jensen’s shoulder and hand at once. Jensen held on a little bit longer. 

“I think I can still break them.”

“Only because you’re a barbarian,” Pritchard sighed, picking up the other hand. “You ready for the other one?”

Jensen shook his head, stiff and awkward once more. “Gotta piss first.”

Pritchard didn’t let him try on his own, he bent the arm at the elbow, laying it across his chest before putting the working one on it, supporting it. “You let that thing hang it’s a dead weight. I wasn’t joking about you ripping off a limb.”

Jensen just grumbled and swung his legs out from under the blankets. Pritchard wasn’t looking. As curious as he was about just high up Jensen’s augmentations went, he didn’t look. When Jensen swore, falling to his knees, barely able to keep a hold of that elbow in an attempt to keep his balance, Pritchard was there, sliding off the comforter to be in front of the man who was, in all ways physical his superior. 

“Shit, when’s the last time you ate?” 

Jensen was shaking, perspiring heavily once more. “I don’t remember.”

“Shit.” He wrapped himself around Jensen’s back, one hand on his elbow, the other around his waist, hoisting him to his feet. Jensen wasn’t much taller than him but he acted like he was and he was at least a hundred pounds heavier. “You have to eat, Jensen! You’re caloric intake should be at least double what you’re used to!” 

“You’re not going to help me piss.” Jensen whimpered. He was wearing pants at least, though they didn’t hide anything. Gray sweatpants, bunched up at the waist and the ankles, showing a tube towards the front that left nothing to the imagination. Pritchard would rather have died than admit to using said imagination for such purposes but whatever curiosity he had was now well answered. 

“I’m not going to help you clean your piss off the floor either,” Pritchard started walking. Jensen’s legs were weak, the black toes clicking on the floor. The only thing that looked soft in this place were those sweats Jensen was wearing. His bed was a bit, but it looked about as comfortable as the couch or the floor. 

They got to the bathroom door before Jensen paused, slumping against Pritchard’s shoulder. “You don’t want to go in there, it’s a mess.”

Pritchard opened the door anyway, pulling Jensen inside. Neither of them had to worry about stepping on the glass in their footwear. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Jensen, but the rest of your apartment isn’t exactly the Hilton. And I was in here already.”

Jensen thought on that, trying to remember through the haze of pain he’d been in. “You’re sick.”

“Ha! No, not quite.” He set Jensen down on the toilet. That was as far as he was going to go. “Sarif sent me the information on your arms. That always makes me throw up.”

“What, in your head?”

“You’re not the only person in the room who’s augmented you know.” He turned then and left the bathroom, letting Jensen figure out how to go to the bathroom and not let the dead weight of his arm yank itself from the socket at the same time. He pulled out his phone and dialed up, what he assumed from all the piles of pizza boxes that were around the apartment, was Jensen’s favorite deliverer. He tried not to think about Jensen’s dick, that or what he’d said about squeezing it, because now that he’d seen it’s flaccid size, even hidden away, it was very easy for him to visualize the two things at the same time. 

A few minutes and he went back in there to gather Jensen up and help him back to the bed. Bed was probably the last place Jensen should have been in, but there was a lot of space for Pritchard to work. He lay down and released his arm, letting Pirtchard pop off his thumb and the panel for his palm. He didn’t speak, not even a thank you for the help, but Pritchard didn’t press. He had an idea as to why Jensen’s mirror was broken. He’d wanted to break a lot of mirrors in his own life, mostly when he was a teenager, but the fear of his parents having to replace it, of knowing how the hormones raging within his body made him want to tear it all to pieces, was enough to keep the reflection intact. 

“I didn’t know you were augmented,” Jensen finally said, though his voice was so quiet Pritchard could hardly tell. 

“Nothing major, mind you,” he explained. Speaking ruined the silence and that was enough for the time being, “I had to pay for most of them out of pocket, nothing that insurance would cover and a lot of them were from before I met Sarif. They’re all inconspicuous.” and not as beautiful as these, he wanted to say. That wouldn’t help. Him finding Adam beautiful wasn’t helping. And his name was Jensen, not Adam, because first names were things you called your friends.

“So no one stares at you. You’re lucky.” 

People stared. People have always stared. Pritchard remembered old men staring at him when he was younger, back before he knew himself as intimately as he did now, their eyes on his chest or his ass or his hair. People stared later, when he did know, when they couldn’t tell, when old men told him they could fix him, when parents of friends said that he shouldn’t have cut his hair, they liked it long. People stared later still, when his head was shaved and the augmentations were ugly lines surrounded by infection, by swelling, by red, and they still couldn’t tell what he was even though he corrected them with a cracking voice. People still stare, but it’s rare now, he owns himself. None of them can guess that he’s not all that he seems. 

He lowered the strength in Jensen’s hand. He sighed. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to say it. He didn’t want to be gentle. He didn’t want Jensen to let him in and he definitely didn’t want to let Jensen in. They were coworkers, nothing more. They would never be friends. They would never be more than friends, the awful thing that helped Pritchard sleep at night after jacking off. He sighed again. 

His voice was so soft that Jensen’s eyes opened and he stared and Pritchard wanted to shrink away, to never be seen again. It was too late though, he’d already started. 

“I know what you see in your mirror, Adam, that you expect to see yourself and instead there’s someone you don’t know. I know that this new person, he isn’t what you want to be, you want to go forward, go back, whichever way you were supposed to be, but the world didn’t give you the hand you needed for that. So this new man looks like a monster and the world doesn’t help at all. People see you and they stare and they expect you to be a certain way. And they say things and I say things and you say things, and they all build up and grow into something terrible, feeding this monster that you see.”

Some hair had fallen from Pritchard’s ponytail at some point, he hadn’t noticed, possibly when he was throwing up, but now, Adam’s hand was coming up, brushing it behind his ear. His eyes didn’t look any different from usual, but there were tears brimming around them, about to fall from those dark lashes. Pritchard didn’t stop though, even though his voice was wobbling on its own. 

“You aren’t a monster, no matter what they say, no matter what you see. Those things that make you different from the rest, they don’t make you beautiful, but they don’t make you something other than human either. You’re still Adam Jensen, no matter what society says, no matter what slurs people call you, no matter what they expect you to do. You didn’t ask for this, but you have to own it, you have to make it yours. It will kill you, if you don’t.”

He placed the panel back, snapped the thumb back on. Jensen’s hand hadn’t left his face, was tracing along his jaw. It was intimate and terrifying and Pritchard didn’t allow himself to lean into it. 

“What happened to you?” Jensen asked, his voice just as soft as Pritchard’s. 

The look Pritchard gave him was cold, safe, guarded. He had holes in his firewalls but he was very good at patching them. It wasn’t often that something came through. He had to plug it before Jensen got through and he knew Jensen was practicing at it. “I did.”

He restarted Jensen’s arm and they tested it again, found it satisfactory. Neither of them spoke. It was strange, awkward, and Pritchard wanted to play some music, just to kill the silence, so different from before. The silence after that was easier, Jensen falling asleep almost immediately once it was all done. He was back under the blankets and his features were so soft and relaxed that Pritchard could have kissed him, but he didn’t, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t dare to. They weren’t friends. 

He wanted to get to work but he knew he couldn’t leave Jensen like this. He had his laptop, he could work while he was there, but there were too many distractions, the mess everywhere, Jensen’s light snoring. He had to be there, anyway. He had to answer the door at some point and Jensen was too weak to even get out of bed. 

So he cleaned. He hunted down some garbage bags and filled them with all the empty bottles, the pizza boxes, everything that he could see that was obvious trash. If he were to clean it to his standards there wouldn’t be anything left. As it was, he’d only gotten the living room and kitchen devoid of garbage by time there was a knock on the door. 

“So, where’s the party?” the delivery person asked, before he’d even taken the pile of pizzas from her. She wasn’t alone either, there was a teenager with her, probably a trainee, with another stack. He didn’t know what Jensen liked, so he’d gotten one of everything. That would take care of his caloric intake too. 

“No party,” he grumbled, letting them in so they could set their treasures on the coffee table. There was no dining table in the place and it hit Pritchard that Jensen was probably terribly lonely, as was he. “Just the two of us.”

The pair of them paled a little bit, too awkward to continue their cheery small talk. He signed off on it, paid for it all himself while mentally adding the charge to the long list of thing Sarif owed him, and sent them on their way. 

He grabbed the top three boxes and headed back to the bedroom. Jensen was still asleep, though the sweat had dried and he was no relaxed, body in a normal position, a human position. Pritchard opened the blinds and piled up whatever pillows weren’t currently under Jensen against the headboard, so they could sit against it. 

He tapped Jensen on the shoulder, where he knew there was still flesh. The man opened one eye, groggily looking up at him. “I was just getting to the good part.” 

Pritchard had to fight the urge to ask if he was in it, since his mind was only going to the sexual good parts of dreams. He wasn’t normally like that. He didn’t want to think of Jensen like that. He’d already seen too much of him. 

“Food. You have to eat.”

“Yes, mother,” Jensen joked. 

“If you want someone to play your mommy I’m sure we could go hire one of the girls down past the police station,” he kicked back. 

Jensen picked up a slice and Pritchard just wished that he could send a picture of that to Sarif; cheap bland pepperoni grease staining those million dollar fingers that he was so proud of. Pritchard took a slice too. 

“I wasn’t expecting you to still be here, Francis,” Jensen mentioned around a mouthful. 

“You truly are barbaric aren’t you?” he tired to tear the long string of cheese from the tip, not looking at him. “Someone had to pay for your food, didn’t they?” 

“Come on, you didn’t spend that much.”

“There’s nine more boxes in the living room. You have to eat all this to get your energy up enough to go out there for the rest.” 

Jensen’s eyes went wide. “You’re joking.”

Pritchard raised an eyebrow. “Do I look like I’m joking?”

“You look like a lot of things, Francis.”

Pritchard didn’t know what that meant and he was terrified of asked. “You know, you keep calling me Francis, I’m going to start thinking you like me.”

Jensen looked at him then and there were so many secrets that Pritchard held to his chest, so many things that would have broken him if Jensen knew them, but he looked at him as if he was someone he could trust, someone he could rely on. Pritchard had become that person, as much as he didn’t want to be. 

“Would it be so bad if I did?”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is not what it was meant to be: it's a lot longer, it's not rated E, Francis is trans, there isn't a blowjob, I didn't write it 2 years ago like I meant to. Oh well, it's a lot better than I was expecting it to be, considereng all that.


End file.
